"This comes as usage of our services continues to grow, but also as more governments have made requests than ever before," said Google in a statement. "And these numbers only include the requests we're allowed to publish."

The search engine firm also broke the figures down on a per-country basis, revealing that the US made by far the most data requests, with 10,918 inquiries coming from the Obama administration.

India came in second with 2,691, followed by Germany, France and the UK, with the latter lodging 2,174 requests.

Google is prohibited from publishing specific data about the nature of the data request, but has lobbied the US government for more transparency regarding the information it is able to disclose to users.